In making a fishing fly, it is often desirable to impregnate a portion of the body of the fly around the shaft of the hook with a curable resin such as a room temperature curing epoxy. This is conventionally done by capturing the fly in a rotatable vise, impregnating the fly as desired with the resin and then hand rotating the fly by a handle associated with the vise. The purpose of this rotation is to maintain an uniform distribution of the resin about the fly during the curing of the resin. This curing procedure is tiring and time consuming for the fisherman. Frequently, the rotation imparted to the fly is spotty because the fisherman loses interest in the procedure which can last from 5 to 45 minutes for the resin to set. Final cure is done by removing the fly from the vise and setting it aside. These cure schedules are dictated by the curing catalyst/accelerators used in the epoxy resin. A short-time cure resin is generally used in the initial development of the fly. It is then followed by application of a longer-time cure resin. In general, the short-time cure resin application is used in developing the initial fly structure. The initial setting of the resin may take as little as 5 minutes and then the fly is set aside for about 24 hours. The next application of resin is a longer-time cured epoxy resin. A typical resin of this type has a time cure of about 30-45 minutes. Such a cure merely sets the resin, and leaving the resin overnight for about a 24 hour period will result, in the typical case, in a complete cure. Actually, epoxy resins continue curing for days afterwards, but it is conventional to assume that the 24 hour setting of the resin results in a full cure.
As noted above, the procedure of impregnating the fly is tiresome and hand rotation is spottily applied. When the rotation of the fly with the curing resin is nonuniformly applied, the resin has a tendency to sag. As a result, part of the fly gets more resin and another part gets less resin. Such a fly loses the appearance that the fisherman seeks in the fly, makes the fly less effective as a lure for the fish, and adversely affects the casting and retrieving qualities of the fly.
It is an object of this invention to minimize the nonuniform curing of the resin on the fly.
It is another object of this invention to reduce sagging of the resin on the fly during the curing of the resin.
It is another object of this invention to hasten the cure of the resin applied to the fly without sagging.
It is a further object of this invention to automate the cure cycle of the resin applied to the fly.
It is another object of the invention to make resin impregnated fishing flies that have a uniform distribution of the impregnated resin about the zone of impregnation of the fly.
Another object of this invention is the provision of a revolving wheel that will receive the hook point of the curable resin impregnated fishing fly, and will rotate the fly during the curing of the resin.
A further objective of the invention is a revolving wheel that is capable of receiving a plurality of such flies and which can be so used repeatedly.